Dodecagon rosette
وردة اثنتي عشريةThree orders of star in one field, each drawn as a rosette: twelve, six and four.
How it is made
The ground
The pattern is not drawn freehand onto the page. It grows out of this tiling — truncated-trihexagonal — which never appears in the finished drawing and decides everything in it.
The contact angle
At the middle of every edge sits a point. Two rays leave it into the tile, each at the same angle from that edge, and run until they meet another. That angle is the whole parameter. This family is drawn between 58° and 76°, a range settled by eye.
The rosette
One step further: the star at the centre of each large tile is replaced by a rosette, a ring of petals and kites around it. Kaplan sets the construction out formally, and it is what gives these families their depth.
The numbers
- Ground
- truncated-trihexagonal
- Symmetry
- Periodic
- Contact angle
- 58°–76°
- Construction
- Hankin polygons-in-contact, rosette transform
Sources
- Kaplan, Craig S. (2005). Islamic Star Patterns from Polygons in Contact. Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2005. pp. 177–185. read it
- Hankin, E. H. (1925). The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art. Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, No. 15. Government of India, Calcutta. ii + 25 pp., XIV plates. read it
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